Vineyard Expansion and Paris Pop-Up Part Deux
Bonjour. I am just back from Paris after hosting my second pop-up wine bar, which you can read about below. While things have been a little quiet back here in Austria I do have some exciting news to share.
Thanks to my good friends at the Feldtheorie winery, I am expanding my vineyard this year to include 288 new vines of Chenin Blanc. In the early summer we will graft Chenin onto old Grüner Veltliner vines in a vineyard located about 10 minutes from my vineyard in Kremsleithen. You can read the technical details here about grafting, but it’s a technique that joins two plants together so they continue to grow as one plant. Working with a professional grafting team, they will take cuttings from a healthy Chenin plant and combine them with the Grüner. It’s all done in a few hours and by 2027 the new grafted Chenin vines will be producing a healthy harvest of several hundred kilos, which means lots more bottles of delicious wine.
My second piece of good news, which I hinted about back in December, is that 12 bottles of my 2024 vintage are in Paris available at a wine shop. The shop is called the Secret Wine Door and if you are one of the first to buy a bottle you will get a surprise gift — so to my Parisian friends allez, allez, allez!
Paris Wine Pop-Up Part Deux
This past February from 1 to 21, 49 wineries, from large cooperatives, including Domäne Wachau to boutique wineries, such as Weinhof Locknbauer in Styria, took part in the second edition of the pop-up in Paris. Once again, we were open every evening from 6 p.m. to midnight, and both wine experts and consumers, had the opportunity to taste 63 different wines. Similar to last year, only tips were requested, but this time we had a VAT number making it possible for anyone to purchase bottles.
Each week, we featured a new menu, and wines were served by several producers and wine professionals, including me. Each of us studied the fact sheets on each wine to be as knowledgeable as possible and we added personal anecdotes and stories about each of the winemakers, including the unforgettable inspiration behind the name of the Small Crotch Winery in the Weinviertel region. The combination of wine knowledge, wit, and enthusiasm was very well received by the guests, who rewarded us by purchasing nearly all of our inventory.
Over the course of 21 days, we sold 411 bottles worth almost €10,000 to 509 guests. Special thanks to my former IBM colleagues, who happened to be in Paris for a meeting, for buying nearly all of my bottles of 2024 Kapitel Zwei Dilemma.❤️
Demand was particularly strong for both orange and red wines, the later was surprising considering the global downward trend.
Marketing was done via Instagram and word-of-mouth, thanks to the active Austrian community in Paris, including the Austrian Embassy, Austria Tourism, and the Kulturforum Paris.
We hope to repeat our success later this year in additional European cities.
I’ll close with this terrific quote from blogger Jon Cellier, who attended the pop-up one evening with his colleagues:
“The Austrian Wine Pop-Up isn’t just an event. It’s a masterclass in wine discovery and marketing. Instead of waiting for sommeliers and importers to discover them, Austrian producers are showing up in person. They’re pouring their wines. They’re telling their stories. They’re inviting Paris to taste what they’ve been missing.”
